About the Birmingham Media Hub

About
The Birmingham Media Hub

Current Work.

Most of the Phase 1 leased lines are due for renewal in the next few months. At the time they were installed, leased line cable connections were the only viable connection method. Since then, several alternatives have become available and we would like to use this opportunity to evaluate re-engineering our connection methods.

We have installed a radio based backbone link and neighbourhood distribution system for Greenford House and the Wyrley Birch estate with ENTA. Three of the 6 ENTA sites for the Peoples Local Learning Partnership have already been connected, and one more is in planning. Find out more here.
www.pllp.org.uk The People's Local Learning Partnership web site.

We are now part of the Corporate Network Services department of Birmingham City Council, and are starting to act as a testbed for various connectivity methods which could be used to supplement the extensive 2MB/s and 64/128KB/s leased line network which they operate.

Also we are acting as I.T. consultants to the Aston Pride project in Aston Ward. A number of projects are emerging there, links will be added to this page as they are available.
www.aston-pride.org.uk Aston Pride Portal.
www.Aston-CAN.org.uk Aston Community Area Network.
January 2004:- Following a change of strategy by the Aston Pride board, the city's Education Dept has now taken the lead role in this project.

Following the successful move of premises over the weekend of 19th/20th/21st April 2002, The Birmingham Media Hub is now located in its new premises on the south side of Aston Science Park. This involved the moving of 11 2MB/s leased lines, radio links and three racks full of servers and network switching equipment. Click here to see what happened.

August 2004, Guess what! We're on the move again, this time to Lancaster Circus. More details to follow sometime...., but probably by end of December.

Recent additions to the www.mediahub.co.uk website include a webmail comment form,
A direct link to the current status and
A TrafficCam looking at the Aston Fire Station roundabout and flyover.
Unfortunately this is now out of action for a while due to network changes, it is planned to have it operational as soon as circumstances allow.

September 2004, As Linux matures it is increasingly obvious that it is becoming a possible replacement for windows desktop systems. To test out how we could use it on the desktop a development machine has been built which is a drop in replacement for the current windows systems.
Spec is :-
Slackware 10 linux with X11 and KDE desktop (althought Gnome would work just as well),
ncpfs with custom written bash scripts for Novell 5.0 file and print access,
Win32 version of Lotus Notes 5.0.10 running under Wine for groupware applications and email,

Mozilla and Konqueror web browsers (no I.E. in sight - Hooray!!)
and Open Office as a word processor and spreadsheet package.

The next generation internet will use IPv6. Media Hub has set up an experimental ipv6 website, www6.mediahub.co.uk. As it is under development,it is frequently unavailable, also as it is ipv6 *only* and not ipv4, you will not see unless your network, os and browser are all ipv6 aware.
Ipv6 internally is still some way off, but the pieces are falling in to place, Novell Netware 6.5, Cisco and Linux are fully compliant, windows claims to be but seems unable to resolve ipv6 names using only ipv6.

February 2005, We are now fully part of Birmingham City Council and are in the process of changing our name to "Business Solutions & IT, Community Networks".

April 2005 :- The Holt Court location is now closed, our office has been moved to 5th Floor, Canterbury House, Newhall Street, Birmingham, B3 1LH. Please address all correspondence to this location.

Last updated 21/03/2005.

Mediahub Phase 1	Community Connections
The Employment Resource Centre Network	The People's Local Learning Partnership